Forklift, Ohio’s double issue weighs in at a hefty 10-½ ounces of almost exclusively poetry from 63 contributors. The 258-page, 4.438” x 7.125” issue is divided into 16 sections containing approximately 6.438 works in each. The front of this issue’s handcrafted cover is made from purple 3M™ P100 Advanced Sandpaper with its new NO-SLIP GRIP™ backing. What feels like heavy-duty aluminum foil, the kind you’d use for grilling, covers the industrial staples and the half-inch spine. Upon a cursory inspection—if not for the silver painted fork stabbing the western side of Ohio’s stamped silhouette on the cover—there’s no way to know you’ve got a literary journal in your hands.

2. PLAN YOUR INSTALLATION: TOOLS AND MATERIALS

Of the 103 individual works, approximately 12.621% of them can be considered “prose poems,” “flash pieces,” “short, short fiction” or “essays.” One is a black and white photography selection, “The Basics of Narrative: The Finger Workshop,” by Emily Chenoweth & Co. The ten-photograph essay begins with a picture of a sad face drawn onto an extended middle finger with the remaining fingers of the hand bent at the knuckles. Yes, it’s like you’re being flipped off, but not really, because the palm is facing the camera, and no one who intends to give you the bird would give it that way. The caption, printed in script typewriter font, states: “Introduce your character quickly and efficiently.” The remaining captions are in the same vein—all instructions on how to craft your narrative—with each accompanying photograph capturing the finger in different states of emotion and action.

Juxtapose the levity of Chenoweth’s work with Paul Skenazy’s earnest piece, “In the Wee Small Hours,” a five-page, straight-up, first-person narrative about the sleeping habits of a couple, and you can get a sense of the journal’s range. The narrator admits, “It turns out that I miss her hand the most. Not the sex, not her next to me in bed. I miss her parched hand more than her thighs, hips, the curve in her lower back, the way she talked.”

Other prose pieces include an excerpt from Heidi Reszies Lewis’s “Blue Optimism,” a sober, lyrical piece that begins, “My sorrow can feather seamlessly between pages or press against leaning volumes. It can fold into creases of maps” as well as Nicole Callihan’s companion pieces: “Brooklyn Sidewalk (Day)” and “Brooklyn Sidewalk (Night),” two works set off by text boxes and a different font that feel something akin to journal entries or études in observation. The prose work is diverse in style despite its small sampling.

3. USE AND CARE GUIDE

The contents of the issue are distributed into titled sections such as “Fake Earthquake Movies” and “The Half Jaw Articulator.” You can make thematic conjectures here, finding commonalities between the works in each section—the tension in communication and expectation in “The Secret of the Memory Obliterator” or the role of the body in the section titled “Opinions on Spiritualism.” But these are just suppositions because there are poems that don’t seem to fit thematically, too—Philip Schaefer’s “Once” in the section titled “Direct to the Heart of the Sex Question” or David Winter’s untitled poem in the section “Magic for Everybody,” and there are also poems that could easily be categorized into multiple sections.

I eventually abandoned trying to unpack the issue section by section and read the poems for pleasure. There are too many well-crafted poems to name—I’ve dog-eared many pages—but here are a few highlights: Matt Morton’s “Snow Day,” Carleen Tibbetts’ “The Day is the Great Beast,” Schaefer’s “Dreamy Lawn,” and Frederick Speers’ excerpt from “Torch Songs.” Again, just to name a few.

The journal utilizes a kind of kitsch aesthetic in its artwork, reminiscent of the way lo-fi music achieves a sense of authenticity with its rough-hewn recordings. There are 123 total agri-pastoral-nautical-industrial, turn-of-the-century-to-mid-century images of Americana, approximately 0.477 per page. They satisfy the journal’s predilection for “the aesthetics of early industrialized society in a distinctly post-industrial fashion.” Sometimes the images are too on the nose like the Murine eye lubricant advertisement accompanying Jim Whiteside’s “Failed Love Poem” where the speaker refers to the subject’s “one glossed eye,” and sometimes the diagrams and bygone propagandist illustrations show no connection to the work.

The sheer density of the artwork may actually indicate something less authentic and more wry. But the journal doesn’t seem to convey the same irony when presenting contemporary poetry. The poems question existence and experience in a way that resonates. From “Observations from the Deck of a Building I’ve Yet to Climb,” Amy King offers: “Whenever you go, your life is where you’re at, and I know nothing/truer than that.” In “I am Dead,” Lauren Clark writes:

What did I learn?

Even you are not equivalent to you.

You have never been you.

You have never sounded like you.

And from the excerpt from “Torch Songs” by Speers, we learn: “and so it is/And is—is pointless to pin-point the heart’s true form/Although, we—make a start to work from.” The poems, like the prose, are diverse in style and form. They work to evoke images, emotions, and memories and are often more than mere exercises in language.

4. TROUBLESHOOTING AND SAFEGUARDS

Though you can find diversity in style and form, the speakers of the poems could, for the most part, hail from the same place—maybe an imaginary town (Forklift) in the not so imaginary Putnam County, Ohio. With references to Seinfeld, the Boston Red Sox, Smell-O-Vision, Coney Island, state fairs, etc., there is a distinct kind of American voice here. And given the Midwestern or Great Lakes Regional (depending on whom you ask) name of the journal, this seems apropos.

5. IMPORTANT SAFETY INSTRUCTIONS AND CONTACTING THE MANUFACTURER

Forklift, Ohio accepts original poetry, short-short fiction, and creative non-fiction related to topics such as “home economics, industry, agriculture, health, science, commerce, advertising, propaganda, etc.” But think of these categories as inclusive and not exclusive. Thematically, the journal’s scope is fairly broad.

The journal reads submissions during the months of May and October only, and as of April 2015, new guidelines ask that you query the editors before submitting any work. Though the extra step in their curatorial process may seem intimidating, take a look at the journal’s policy on their website, specifically the FAQ’s, for an explanation of the query process as well as helpful tips on submitting.

Contributors appear to be early to mid-career, and many have MFA degrees as well as individual publications from notable journals; chapbooks; full-length collections; and awards.

6. WARRANTY SERVICE AND RESTRICTIONS

In a time when litmags proliferate both online and in print, Forklift’s unique selling proposition in the literary journal marketplace may be its ability to wholeheartedly present contemporary poetry in a way that doesn’t take itself so seriously, which opens up all kinds of dialogue regarding what contemporary poetry is, what it should be, how we read it, how we categorize it, etc. It’s hard not to admire the journal.

Forklift states they publish “approximately 1.618 times a year.” You can find print issues for sale on their website as well as chapbooks published under Forklift, Ink. and full-length collections published by Forklift_Books.